Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [56]
Skewed numbers are endemic in every field, and as we have seen, the discrepancies can be huge. Official estimates of the bad debt crisis went from ¥27 trillion in the early 1990s to ¥35 trillion in ]996,¥60 trillion in 1997, and¥77 trillion in 1999 – and even then MOF was far from admitting the true figure, which might he double that amount. The national budget, as solemnly announced every spring by the press, is not all that it seems. There is a «second budget,» called Zaito (or FILP, Fiscal Investment and Loan Program), out of which MOF distributes funds independently of parliamentary control. Zaito, which is almost never reported in the newspapers – indeed, many people have never even heard of it – amounts to as much as 60 percent of the official budget. We shall have more to say about Zaito in chapter 6.
In the case of medical costs, Japan's expenditures appear to be far below those of the United States-but that's because published costs do not include the payments of ¥100,000-200,000 that patients customarily hand to their doctors in plain white envelopes when they have surgery. There is no way to calculate how much under-the-table money boosts Japan's national medical bill. Indeed, medicine is a statistical Alice in Wonderland where the numbers verge on comedy As for drug testing, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has never enforced scientific protocols, and payoffs from drug companies to doctors are commonplace, with the result that Japanese medical results have become a laughingstock in world medical journals.
It is no exaggeration to say that no technical or academic field in Japan stands on firm factual ground. In November 2000, Mainichi Shimbun revealed that Fujimura Shinichi, Japan's leading archaeologist, had been caught red-handed burying prehistoric artifacts at an excavation site. He later «discovered» these artifacts and used them as evidence that human habitation in Japan occurred one hundred thousand years earlier than previously thought. Fujimura had worked on 180 sites; the scandal undoes much of the work of prehistoric archaeology in Japan over the last fifteen years. No one knows how the mess can ever be cleaned up.
In short, everywhere you look you find that information i n Japan is not to be trusted. I will admit to a twinge of fear myself, for this book is filled with statistics whose accuracy I cannot gauge.
Sapio magazine calls Japan Joho Sakoku, "a closed country f or information." This blockage-or screening-of information about the rest of the world happens not just because of overt government controls but because of systemic bottlenecks encountered everywhere. News arrives in Japan, and then, like a shipment of bananas held up at port, it rots on the dock. With the exception of a few industrial areas where it is vitally important for Japan to acquire the latest techniques from the West, information rarely makes it into daily life, beyond the television screen or the newspaper headline. This is because for new concepts from abroad to be put into practice, certain prerequisites must be met.
One is the active involvement of foreigners. When Shogun Hideyoshi imported new ceramics techniques to Japan at the end of the sixteenth century, he shipped entire villages of Koreans to Japan and settled them in Kyushu. In early Meiji (1868-1900), Japan brought over hundreds of yatoi gaikokujin, "hired foreigners," who designed railroads, factories, schools, and hospitals, and trained tens of thousands of students. Indeed, the very term used by Sapio magazine, sakoku ("closed country"), is an old one, dating to the shogunal edict that closed Japan in the early 1600s; despite the opening in the Meiji period, the tradition never died. After the yatoi gaikokujin served their purpose, the government sent most of them away, and for a good century foreigners have not been permitted to have influence in Japanese society.
In the 1990s, the Ministry of Education forced national universities to dismiss foreign